Episode Overview
Jessica Dawkins grew up on a rural Indiana farm, raised by a single mother born in East Tennessee and a grandmother whose family had lived on a mountain ridge straddling the Tennessee/North Carolina border for two centuries. When Indian Removal came, the men walked West and died on the trail. The women and children hid in caves for four months. What followed for generations was poverty, addiction, silence, and the slow erasure of who they were. Jessica knew by second grade that none of it was her fault. She just had to turn eighteen and get out.
Music was a refuge. She was on the radio at fifteen, backstage at Deer Creek by seventeen, living between a dorm in Bloomington and a boyfriend’s band house in Louisville by eighteen. Motherhood rearranged her life. Education gave her language for what she already understood. She landed in history because a gold-leafed book caught her eye in a dark hallway she wasn’t supposed to walk through, and she opened it, and a map of Louisville in 1852 fell into her hands, and she found her house on it. That was the moment it all clicked for her.
Jessica is a proud member of Generation X, a Southerner raised north of Ohio River, a single mother who broke every cycle she inherited, and a rock & roll bad ass who cofounded a roller derby league because nobody was going to tell her she couldn’t.
We share a frequency—music, history, the South, daughters, and the belief that honesty and integrity is the only leadership strategy worth pursuing.
Our Crossroads
Jessica and I met through our professional careers as historians. We connected in myriad ways. We are both Gen Xers. We each grew up Southerners in places that don’t always register as the South. Jessica grew up on a farm in Indiana, with roots in the mountains of East Tennessee. I grew up in Stuart, a small beach town a hundred miles north of Miami.
We are parents of daughters and conscious every day of breaking the cycles we inherited. We believe local history belongs to the people who live it, institutions exist to serve their communities, and honesty is the only leadership strategy that holds. That is a hill we have each died on.
The Conversation
We started with roller derby, that’s where Jessica starts her own rock & roll story—at the roller rink racing with her best friend and eventually co-founding the Derby City Roller Girls in Louisville in 2006. Twenty-five women in matching satin jackets who built a business from the ground up, trained as athletes, and faced judgment from people who couldn’t reconcile hot pants with professional ambition. She puts roller derby on her resume because it was entrepreneurship, team leadership, and community building wrapped in fishnet stockings and set to the Beastie Boys.
From there we went to family—a mountain ridge in East Tennessee, the Cherokee women who hid in caves, the poverty and addiction and silence that followed for generations. Jessica knew by second grade that she had been born into something that was not her fault. She counted the years until she turned eighteen.
We talked about motherhood. Her daughters—twenty-three and fourteen. She drew lines and held them, not out of strictness but out of intention. She raised them the way she wished she had been raised, which is the whole point of breaking cycles.
We talked about education. She failed out of Indiana University because music mattered more than French credits. She went back to community college at twenty-six with a toddler and no money. Financial aid eligible because she had a dependent. A local scholarship because nobody else applied. A national scholarship because the foundation believed in non-traditional students. Every door opened because she knocked on it—or because it was unlocked and she walked through anyway.
We talked about GenX as a leadership superpower. Jessica realized hers when she was the only person her job who could run both the cash register and a point-of-sale system. She speaks in fluent Boomer, Millennial, and Zoomer.
We talked about Louisville—her 250-year-old city with no history museum, where history has been told through the plantation owners who saved their houses. Jessica loves it anyway. She made it her home on purpose thirty years ago and has spent her career trying to make its institutions worthy of the people they serve. She believes a museum is no different than a restaurant—you hope they come in, enjoy themselves for an hour and a half, and walk out wanting to bring friends. She went from saying “welcome” to saying “this place belongs to you.”
Unique swag from LLtABB
Jimmy Carter. I’ve always loved this Walt McNamee shot of then-candidate Jimmy Carter in an Allman Brothers shirt. Carter is speaking to reporters July 4 weekend 1976, shortly after the band’s break-up and Gregg’s testimony in a federal drug case. I tagged the barn in the back with Long Live the ABB shroom 2 from Psychodelik Pete.
Fillmore East ad. This is an adaptation of an original newspaper advertisement for the original Fillmore East recording sessions. I replaced Johnny Winter’s face with the LLtABB shroom and moved the Allman Brothers to the TOP of the bill, a spot they EARNED after Johnny Winter demanded they switch places because he didn’t want to follow them.
